So, I've been reading up on countries in the Arabian Peninsula and Africa as well as conflicts within them. A question I keep asking but that I seldom find an answer to is where all the weapons involved in the conflicts actually come from, ie where they were originally produced (and who the main people with blood money on their hands are). Is there a good, comprehensive website on this somewhere? The ideal would be a site that has a global world weapon map that would let you choose for example 'origin country: Sweden' and then it would color all areas where known Sweden-produced weapons are located. Also with a function that lets you choose an area and then it would present relevant articles and WHO-info etc etc. I'm guessing there is no such site, but at the moment I have pretty much no idea where to get this info so please, if you know a site that somewhat resembles what I want, post it here. I think accurate info about weapons production is very important and that if the media simply said where the arms in current conflicts were produced they could easily paint a much more interesting and complex picture of what is happening.

Of course, general discussion about figuring out where weapons come from is also welcome. However, I'd like the thread to steer free from moralizing about weapons production as well as US bashing if possible. This thread is meant to focus on availability of and different ways of obtaining info about weapons in the world. If you want to discuss the actual problems related to weapons production in the world, please create a new thread as I want to keep focus with this thread.

(I do realize that there's a pretty good chance noone will have a good answer to this in which case I say oh well, thanks for reading)

I can't provide you with a comprehensive answer but it's usually the UK, the US, many EU countries, etc.

If I see something like you are looking for I'll let you know

France is probably the largest western weapons dealer.

A lot of it is surplus Soviet stuff though.

It's my understanding that a large proportion of the black market guns in Africa are old AK-47s and other weapons that came either from russia, or from The USA during the cold war.

However, all the big nations (US, UK, Russia, China, South Korea, etc) continue to sell arms to Africa, though presumably to the state, some probably leak through to the black market, and many are simply used to massacre the citizens the goverment opposes.

Another way guns enter the countries is through smuggling guns bought at the public gun fares held in America.

http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afre...54arms.htm Wrote:Millions of light arms -- lightweight, highly portable, and devastatingly effective in the hands of even young or poorly trained users -- were shipped to Africa during the Cold War to equip anti-colonial fighters, newly independent states and superpower proxy forces alike. The collapse of the Soviet bloc saw a new flood of small arms entering Africa as manufacturers put additional millions of surplus Cold War-era weapons on the international arms market at cut-rate prices.

Years later, these durable killing machines fight on in the hands of insurgents, local militias, criminal organizations and ordinary people left vulnerable to violence by ineffective policing and simmering civil conflict. In some parts of Africa, a Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifle, coveted for its simplicity and firepower, can be purchased for as little as $6, or traded for a chicken or sack of grain. In 1999 the Red Cross estimated that in the Somali capital of Mogadishu alone, the city's 1.3 million residents possessed over a million guns -- among an estimated 550 mn small arms in circulation worldwide.

wiki on arms exports and imports: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_indust..._exporters
and, there might be something in the links from this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_arms_proliferation

And I thought this was a chromosomic thread...

Surreal Wrote:So, I've been reading up on countries in the Arabian Peninsula and Africa as well as conflicts within them. A question I keep asking but that I seldom find an answer to is where all the weapons involved in the conflicts actually come from, ie where they were originally produced (and who the main people with blood money on their hands are).

90% of the time it's

Ex Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact
China
North Korea

+ Local production (Lots of states bought the "rights" to produce their own weapons)

Thanks for all the replies! They've been very helpful. Through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_indust..._exporters (thanks Icecream) I found http://www.sipri.org/databases which is very similar to what I wanted. Of course, I also realize it's hard for anyone to get good, accurate info about the black market since, well, if you're in the business you're not too keen on reporting your sales to some statistics bureau.

I found this article http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstrans...lease_2011 quite interesting and it is probably a nice introduction for anyone new to this area. I took a quick look at the global exports data on their site, too. I wasn't very surprised, but I still found it noteworthy that Sweden and Netherlands, which generally try to keep a peace-loving image outwards, actually have a weapon export in dollars/capita ratio that's about 75% of the USA.

Yea, Sweden has a big weapons industry but when was the last time a Swedish produced weapon was used in an African civil-war?

It doesn't really happen because the various African rebel groups cannot afford to buy and maintain expensive Swedish or NATO weapons and instead go with cheap ex-Soviet surplus.

kitakitsune Wrote:Yea, Sweden has a big weapons industry but when was the last time a Swedish produced weapon was used in an African civil-war?

It doesn't really happen because the various African rebel groups cannot afford to buy and maintain expensive Swedish or NATO weapons and instead go with cheap ex-Soviet surplus.

I didn't mean to imply that Swedish weapons would be prone to fall into the hands of rebels (though the risk certainly exists, and can't ever be totally disregarded when you sell tools made for killing. if you follow the sipri link in my earlier post and look at the past 30 years of Swedish exports you'll see that the risk that Swedish weapons have been/are being used by what in most of the West sees as 'evil' fighters is considerably high based on the areas exported to). I was merely noting that it was an interesting fact since Sweden publicly promotes peace and many Swedes view the US, partly, as a warmachine pumping out arms and inciting conflicts - and forget or are ignorant to how much our own country is spreading weapons globally. I'm from a town with a long history of producing military equipment and have always thought we produce more than we'd like to admit, but I have a feeling the majority of Swedes grossly underestimate the weapons industry in Sweden.

However, while I admit I haven't been ultra objective in my posts, like I said in the OP this thread wasn't meant to be for moralizing and I don't want to say that Swedish weapons exports are 'bad' or 'good'. Only that there is a dissonance between public knowledge and the actual situation.

Edit: Eratik > Hah whoops the title reference was more obscure than I thought now that I looked it up. It's a reference to the games "Feel the Magic XX/XY" and it's sequel "Where Do Babies Come From?" for the DS, I thought there was just one game called "where do babies come from xx/xy". So I guess I was accidentally TOO CLEVER.